d of her hair and the soul that
sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a
tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he sometimes thought of wine
and death and roses.

"I would go farther," she said, and looked as if some other thing
charged with sweetness had come before her.

"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success," Alicia
faltered.

"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she smiled on
her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came
upon her lips. Her thought turned inward absently; it embraced with
sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity, obedience. As if she knew
her betrayal already complete, "I wish I had such a chance," she said.

"You wish you had such a chance!"

"I didn't mean to tell you--you have enough to do to work out your own
problem; but--"

She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a
miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her eyes
instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia looked at
her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the
Promised Land.

"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.

"Who?"

"Hamilton Bradley."

Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all
the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it
beautiful.

"How you will hold me to my metier," she said. "Hamilton Bradley has
given up trying."

"Then--"

"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise
on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently
she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other
woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their
astonishment.

"Well?" said Hilda.

"I can think of no one--there IS no one--except--oh, it's too absurd!
Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant
she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed
with a gravity, a gentleness.

"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems,"
she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--like a thing
born. But it is that--a thing born."

"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.

"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with
its feet in a trap